Insomnia

by PROMINA SHRESTHA

FROM ISSUE # 97 (January 2004) | IN THIS ISSUE
	REFER TO FRIEND		PRINT THIS ARTICLE

You are tired and you want to sleep. The world around you rotates at its usual pace and you're missing out on something glorious and magnificent, yet ordinary to so many— sleep. What do you do? Maybe it's just some (normal) ageing process. When it gets difficult, you use secret home-remedies passed on by some other sleepless person. Still, you lie listlessly in bed— you are, in medical terms, an insomniac. Now what? Hang onto a prescription to see how addicted you become?

Now lets move onto another question. Hyper-reality, does it exist or is it just an illusion of the delusional? Does another dimension exist where we as humans have no comprehension at all?

Hold onto your horses, before you start to rant and rave and accuse me of being a complete nutcase. Well maybe I am, but let's leave it for the authorities to decide. This is a book review , and I am here to tell you about a book I found on some old dusty shelf. Yes, my favorite, Stephen King's—Insomnia. King has the ability to drag you into a story and make you go through whatever the characters experience. This book is no exception; it hits you right on the head and plays with your imagination.

The setting is a little town called Derry. A 70-year-old man finds it extremely difficult to sleep after his wife's death. Life starts taking a new form all around him. Visions appear and the man loses himself in his hallucinations. His attempts to grapple with the realness of his insanity leave him crippled, figuratively speaking. He begins to believe he has lost control his mind; is this insomnia or insanity?

The book starts off like any other King book. The characters are complex and the suspense is fluid; the reader laps it up like water on a bank. The thrills come at you with full force and each crescendo takes you with the force of waves crashing into one another. As the story builds, there seems to be no escape from evil for the characters and the reader.

However, the plot collapses and the ending is the worst one I've ever read; a happy ending—something that rarely happens in a Stephen King book. Even if it does, it always (until this book), has a gruesome twist.

I was disappointed. Though I have read most of his books and come out a satisfied customer, this one put me off… I never thought that he could write a bad book. His signature style of suspense, tricky plot turns and "wow" endings, were completely absent. But then again, maybe you should read it and make up your own mind. What a let down. The time invested in reading this book would have been better spent sitting on the Thamel sidewalk looking over tourists.